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June 6, 2012

Space Mirrors Won’t Fix Climate Change

by editor

Michael Crumbliss for redOrbit.com

Geoengineering is a field of study that proposes techniques to reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface. Methods range from mimicking the effects of large volcanic eruptions by releasing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to deploying giant mirrors in space. Scientists have proposed these sunlight-reflecting solutions as last-ditch attempts to halt global warming.

The researchers studied how four Earth models respond to climate engineering under a specific scenario. This hypothetical scenario assumes a world with a CO2 concentration that is four times higher than preindustrial levels, but where the extra heat caused by such an increase is balanced by a reduction of radiation we receive from the Sun.

Climate engineering cannot be seen as a substitute for a policy pathway of mitigating climate change through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

"A quadrupling of CO2 is at the upper end, but still in the range of what is considered possible at the end of the 21st century," said Hauke Schmidt, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany and lead author of the paper.

Under the scenario studied, rainfall strongly decreases — by about 15 percent (some 100 millimeters of rain per year) of preindustrial precipitation values — in large areas of North America and northern Eurasia. Over central South America, all models show a decrease in rainfall that reaches more than 20 percent in parts of the Amazon region. Other tropical regions see similar changes, both negative and positive. Overall, global rainfall is reduced by about five percent on average in all four models studied.

"The impacts of these changes are yet to be addressed, but the main message is that the climate produced by geoengineering is different to any earlier climate even if the global mean temperature of an earlier climate might be reproduced," Schmidt said.

"This study is the first clean comparison of different models following a strict simulation protocol, allowing us to estimate the robustness of the results. Additionally we are using the newest breed of climate models, the ones that will provide results for the Fifth IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Report," Schmidt added.